"You can't fix it. You can't make it go away.
I don't know what you're going to do about it,
But I know what I'm going to do about it. I'm just
going to walk away from it. Maybe
A small part of it will die if I'm not around
feeding it anymore."
--Lew Welch

As a kind of last hurrah, I sent a dozen artistic directors in town a copy of my short memoir about hyperdrama. In the days of civility, a thank you note would have followed, even if it was deep sixed. Not a peep.

Marie Hatch, who has cancer, was served with a 60-day notice this month to vacate the Craftsman cottage she has lived in for 66 years. In 1950, Hatch was given a verbal agreement, which was passed down through generations of owner ship, that she could live in the cottage for the rest of her life.

Two kitchen track lights burned out. Never replaced these before, looked tricky, but how to video on YouTube looked easy - with the right tools. Don't have, and so couldn't budge lens clip. An idea! H's work bench for art projects, a large pile of clutter - where I found needle nose pliers and got bulb out. At store, learned how expensive they are, could only afford one today. Replaced, works but can't get lens clip back on. Not sure it makes a difference.

My take:
1. If elected as Dem, impotent one term Pres.
2. If Hillary is candidate and he supports her, most likely scenario, same old story.
3. If Hillary is candidate and he runs as independent, elected honorary Republican for helping them so much.
4. If H, and he urges supporters to go Green, supporting Stein, he can stir the pot and begin a political revolution to change the corrupt two party system. ThIs could be a major step.

The energy is there! But it must be focused in a revolutionary way. THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE.

In Nevada, young voters overwhelmingly went for Sanders. Blacks overwhelmingly for Clinton. They split on Latinos. But C won the unions, the women and the poor.

If this holds, plus C's astronomical superdelegate advantage, no way Sanders can win. Will he cave or split? I predict cave. Holding hands and smiling on the podium with Hillary. It's called American politics.

Something to look forward to: a debate between Trump and Clinton should be surreal!

"After the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders has a small 36-32 lead among delegates won in primaries and caucuses. But when superdelegates are included, Clinton leads 483-55, including two new superdelegate endorsements she picked up on Friday, according to the AP count. It's essentially a parallel election that underscores Clinton's lopsided support from the Democratic establishment."

I'm at peace with myself, which hasn't been true until recently. I spent time fretting about my career, in particular devoting so much energy to such an esoteric, avant-garde form as hyperdrama. Should I have remained "a traditional playwright"?

Then I learned my one act hyperdrama is in the canon of first generation hypertext, that there are faculty who respect my work at many universities in the UK, Europe, Scandanavia, South America. I didn't waste time on hyperdrama at all. I'm an esoteric, elitist kind of guy, I deserve an esoteric, elitist reputation.

At peace, I return to traditional drama with 3 new plays and nothing to prove. I am marketing them, and what happens, happens. Round Bend Press will publish them. I'd love to see one done here, for old time's sake before I pass. What happens, happens.

I thought you might like this story from The Washington Post.
Bernie Sanders’s outlandish plans make Republicans look serioushttp://wapo.st/2127kx3

Conventions will be ugly, with party establishments fearing Sanders and Trump. I only fear Cruz. If blacks and Latinos rally behind Clinton, she might pull it out. I don't fear Clinton - in fact, I think she could rise in office as the first woman president. A longshot. I'd vote for Sanders if Warren was his VP but he strikes me more and more as an impractical dreamer. If the convention is brokered, it might be Biden.

A lot of pundits and professional economists have been weighing in on the financial reform plans of candidates like Sanders and Clinton. Paul Krugman, for example, has strongly stated his preference for Clinton’s proposals to reform Wall Street. You’ve noted the problem of lack of detail in the plans you’ve seen. As an economist, does that make it difficult for you to access their merits?

EK: It does. These proposals lack the specificity to allow me, acting only as a professional economist, to draw many conclusions.

On the BBC
I heard a woman
who owns a restaurant
on the island of Lesbos
where in recent years
boats filled with refugees
have landed on her shore
men, women and children
cold, hungry and frightened
fleeing war and despair

and so this amazing woman
put her staff to work
making sandwich after sandwich
and she called on friends
to gather warm clothes and medicine

and she continues to help
the endless fleet of refugees
to this very day, sounding
on the BBC
like it's just another day

The screenplay on which this novella is based on had serious interest from an executive at Robert Wise Productions and from an actress who wanted to come out of retirement to star in it. Another close call, in other words. I've had half a dozen of them, including one that ended right after a "check's in the mail" phone call. It's as tough a business as there is.

Every now and again
someone does something special
to inspire outrageous praise
and all kinds of hype
and I go check it out
curious what the fuss is about
and discover something that someone
of my generation did thirty
or forty or fifty years ago
and did considerably better
which makes me laugh at your ignorance
and capacity for self-congratulation
though I don't laugh one bit
about the disrespect for old age
in this day care center called America

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Email from one of better grad students I ever mentored, unsuccessful in landing teaching job instead landed well paying exec asst position at environmental foundation, sounds well suited to her, solves $$$, and later she'll have time to write. I'm very excited for her! GO GO GO!

Some years back I received an email from a woman who identified herself as a literary agent employed by a major agency. She was leaving to start her own agency. To this end, she had been searching the internet for potential clients and came across my archive. Was I represented? If not she would like to represent me because ... and here followed the most over-stated and outrageous praise of my work I'd ever read, or even imagined.
If she had cooled down on the praise, I may have responded because I was, in fact, between agents. But this was ridiculous. Obviously a scam. I deleted the letter.
A few weeks later I received an email from a former student. Is this legit? he asked, forwarding me the same letter with the same boilerplate praise!
There's a special place in hell for such scammers. This novella was inspired by this experience, a kind of fantasy about how a writer might respond. It's one in my CineFicion series, novellas that originally were screenplays.

The trouble with what is called success
is that later when you lose the attention
it's easy to leap to the conclusion
that the change actually has something
to do with you and is not just another
roll of the dice that your culture likes to call
"support of the arts" when in fact nothing
here is valued except commodities
in the marketplace of pop culture
which makes success as well as failure
irrelevant concepts with regard to the work
you should be doing instead of wasting
so much time fretting about bullshit

WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, dwarfs most western products both in scale – it has around 700 million active accounts – and ambition: despite being first released only in January 2011 as a text/voice/photo-sharing app, it has expanded to provide functionality so that you can order cabs, buy film tickets, play games, check in for flights, pay bills … the list goes on and on.

Best hope I see in this mess of an election is a brokered Dem convention, maybe Repub as well, out of which a new progressive party emerges, which then gets more votes than the Dems. Brokered convention possible but if Sanders splits, probably as Indie, no help in establishing new party. I'd like to see a conservative party as well. Let's create honest labels.

"The Democratic Party is a full partner in the corporate state. Yet Sanders, while critical of Hillary Clinton’s exorbitant speaking fees from firms such as Goldman Sachs, refuses to call out the party and—as Robert Scheer pointed out in a column in October—the Clintons for their role as handmaidens of Wall Street. For Sanders, it is a lie of omission, which is still a lie. And it is a lie that makes the Vermont senator complicit in the con game being played on the American electorate by the Democratic Party establishment."

1
I have much physical evidence
that years ago an impostor
stole my identity and used it
to put plays on a stage
to publish books and articles
to win grants and awards
in a frenzy of literary activity
that finally has come to an end
so that I can be myself again

2
I have vivid memories of being naked
in the presence of beautiful naked women
to the mutal satisfaction of all
but recently have begun to doubt
the veracity of my memory
since I find no concrete evidence
not a photo, not a momento
in any of various family albums
that such encounters actually happened

3
I have a vague feeling that I'm waiting
around for something or someone
who will explain to me the point
of all this spare time on my hands
now that I'm just another forgotten
and ignored and irrelevant senior citizen
who once upon a time had purpose
and was far too busy and productive
to wonder what in hell is going on

Friday, February 12, 2016

What if Sanders changed tactics? What if he refused to jump in the gutter with Clinton and duke it out old school? What if he instead focused on a vision of what America would look like if he won? What if he let us know in detail how he will make this happen? What if he shared how he would overcome an obstructionist Congress?

What if were less angry and more excited, more celebratory, about the possibility of a new world, a political revolution beyond glib rhetoric?

"I went to the Malheur looking for kindred spirits. I found the mad, the fervent, the passionately misguided. I found the unknowing pawns of an existential chess game, in which we are, all of us, now caught. Driving home across the snow-packed Malheur Basin, through mile after mile of sage, with towering basalt cliffs in the near distance, herds of mule deer appearing as gray specks in the tongues of slide rock and wind-exposed yellow grass, I did not wonder what Edward Abbey would have said about all of this, or Kropotkin or the lugubrious monarchist Thomas Hobbes. I thought instead of the old C.S. Lewis books of my childhood, and of Lewis’ writings on the nature of evil, where evil is never a lie, because lying implies creation, and evil, by its nature, has no creative power. Instead, the nature of evil is to take a truth and twist it, sometimes as much as 180 degrees. Love of country becomes hatred of those we believe don’t share our devotion, or don’t share it the same way. The natural right of armed self-defense becomes the means to take over a wildlife refuge, to exert tyranny on those who work there, or those who love the place for the nature it preserves in a world replete with man’s endeavors. The U.S. Constitution, one of the most liberal and empowering documents ever composed, becomes, with just a slight annotation or interpretation, the tool of our own enslavement."

I'm beginning to enjoy this election. I guess because I don't have a candidate ... and because I'm sure no prez can stop Nature. Sanders bores me and I don't trust Hillary, though if she threw Bill out of the house I'd look again. I think Clinton is more flexible than Sanders, good or bad depending on context.

Content doesn't win elections, style does. Sad but true. Sanders' style reminds me of Stevenson - except last night, when he reminded me of Rubio, repeating himself constantly. Clinton won in a blow out, although the choir loves the song repeated.

Sanders has victory in his grasp if he gets help from some acting coaches and focuses on a positive future. We already know the rest.

2 brokered conventions! It could happen. Everybody plays it safe after many ballots. Biden v Romney! Trump and Sanders both run independently. No one wins, To Repub controlled House ... Pres Jeb Bush! Ha ha!

Getting closer, as a renewal notice reminds me this morning. I have the At Bat MLB audio app, every spring, regular, post game broadcast, both home and away stations. Bargain price. Love it. New season version available soon.

Should be doing taxes. More fun to listen to post refuge interviews and recap.

Eye opener on twitter. Many shocked at level of miseducation of these extremists. I think their use of social media has been counter productive to their cause. Happily surprised at how much the dingbats were outnumbered on Twitter.

Will Sanders, if he wins the nomination, follow conventional wisdom and "balance the ticket"? What kind of revolution is that? Or will he go for Warren and a progressive dream ticket? It would be a revealing moment.

In its first year ATHEMOO hosted numerous performance events, in March 1996, Charles Deemer reproduced his hyper drama, "Bride of Edgefield," a play made entirely out of hypertext in the ATHEMOO space. Charles Deemer is an award winning playwright who has worked since 1991 creating 5 different hyperplays. The second performer to use ATHEMOO as a performance space in March 1996 was Cat Herbert who produced a piece in conjunction with Crosswaves Festival in Philadelphia.[10]

###

Some think this performance was the first dramatic performance on the Internet. Certainly was one of the first.

"Call me a bad progressive, but I still think the job of president should go to the most qualified candidate and not the one who tells me what I want to hear even though we both know he’ll never accomplish it. It should go to the person who has been the senator of a state with a diverse population of 20 million, as opposed to a state with a 95% white population of 600,000 and the person who has been secretary of state, rather than the one who pivots back to the domestic economy every time he’s asked about our relationship to the rest of the world."

"What does it mean to shift overnight from a society in which people walk down the street looking around to one in which people walk down the street looking at machines? We wouldn’t be always clutching smartphones if we didn’t believe they made us safer, more productive, less bored, and were useful in all of the ways that a computer in your pocket can be useful. At the same time, smartphone owners describe feeling “frustrated” and “distracted.” In a 2015 Pew survey, 70 percent of respondents said their phones made them feel freer, while 30 percent said they felt like a leash. Nearly half of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds said they used their phones to “avoid others around you.”

Under the weather, sick and tired of same old politics ("the medium is the message"), want to be inspired by a visionary but none to be had, feel like the the dark ages are getting to me. Need to lay low now and forever.

Vicious attack on Bernie by Bill today. Very early rounds of this mess. Bern may rise above it, or try to, but his followers are in for the kill. I hear nothing that I want to hear from Bernie ... He is great at defining enemies, not so great otherwise. And his leftwing ideologues are as bad as the rightwing for meanness. I am beginning to lean to the Green Party. The only real idealism I see. Make it 0-3 ha ha.

Dems may be heading to a brokered convention if it's close. It already is nasty. Sanders can unilaterally save the tone, and would if he were a King or true visionary, but he is an ordinary politician in style. Trump is more creative in this regard.

In three out of four years in the early 1970s, I placed literary stories on the Roll of Honor in the BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES anthology. Agents were writing me to see if I had a novel. I was working on one, THE IDAHO BLUES, and a young agent, later to be a major player, liked the early chapters he saw. But I couldn't figure the form out at the time. My weakness was descriptive prose, establishing a strong sense of place, essential in the longer form. Soon I abandoned fiction for drama, where a set designer solved this burden.

Many of these stories come from that period. Later I would return to the novel with minor success, a better writer and a greater acceptance of minimalism in the form. I still love the short story form but never have returned to it with the energy and passion of my early years as a writer.

But I don't think pragmatism will do it either. When I look at history, I see that systemic changes come after violent revolutions. Bloodshed. We may be in that cycle of history once again. The extremists are ready for it.

A contentious election with Republican winners might radicalize a lot of people.

All this reads like a chapter in LOVE'S BODY. Politics as mental illness.